‘Yes we can’

Reunion, in the southwest corner of the Indian Ocean, is a French Overseas Department with particular strengths. A rainbow population of 117,000 makes for a harmonious dialogue between cultures and religions. This, together with a well-established sugar industry, can help the island meet new challenges, including a modernised transport system, renewable energy and extending its regional influence

After the Airbus A380 demonstration flight to Reunion in November 2009, one of the three daily newspapers, Témoignages, ran the headline “Nou lé capab”, which roughly translates as “Yes we can”. Air Austral, the small Reunion airline, established by local businesses, bought two of the world’s largest aircraft, which only the world’s major airlines had dared to acquire until then. From 2014 these high-density Airbuses will promote “territorial continuity” by carrying more than 840 passengers each way when they ply the route from Reunion to Paris at a third off the market price.

The Reunion Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which holds the concession for the Reunion Roland Garros airport, expects passenger intake to double and reach three million by 2025. Back in the 1970s, there were only a few planes in sleepy Gillor airport, guarded by a couple of gendarmes in shorts and white socks. That was when the former French prime minister Michel Debré (Reunion deputy between 1963 and 1988), launched the “territorial continuity plan” in the name of the nationalist right, which was meant to secure this distant département riddled with separatists and communists.

“All communications must become inter-provincial ones,” explained Debré, convinced that would be enough to pull the island out of isolation (1). He carried out his pledge by organising the emigration of thousands of young Reunionese to France with the support of the office for promoting migration in overseas departments, Bumidom, which the separatists called an instrument of a new black slave trade (2). Such “continuity” could only lead Reunion to an oppressive face-off with France, cut the island off further from its regional environment, and bolster the “assimilation bulldozer” (3).

But times have changed. The leftwing regional council has expressed surprise that for years Reunion did not benefit from the territorial continuity subsidies that the French government granted to Corsica to offset its “insular constraints”. The measure was later extended to all overseas departments but the amounts were ridiculously disproportionate: the Reunionese got 60 times less than the Corsicans.

When President Nicolas Sarkozy passed through Reunion this January, he urged people to “open up to their regional environment” in order to “create jobs, break away from the circle of welfare and vain attempts to catch up with the supposed metropolitan model”. But Reunion had hardly been waiting for his instructions. For the past 10 years, opening up to the world has been a priority for the Regional Council, the institution in charge of the island’s external relations, with neighbouring islands with a francophone tradition in the southwest of the Indian Ocean (an estimated 30 million inhabitants by 2025, nine-tenths of them in Madagascar); with the eastern and southern African countries; and increasingly with the major developing nations such as India and China. Not to mention Europe, still an imperative, even in the tropics (4).

High hopes in fishing

Part of the focus is on the vast maritime area (5). The Reunionese are not fishermen. “They dislike looking at the ocean where cyclones loom,” wrote Roger Vailland in the early 1960s, surprised there was never anyone on the Saint-Denis seafront, except on Sundays (6). “I’ve been trying to convince governments of the importance of the sea in feeding the nation for years,” said Ibrahim Goulamaly, a local entrepreneur who is fighting to defend “French” waters in the area. He claims that “cultivating the sea is an art” and has set up an organic shrimp farm in Mozambique, which has made him the second most important French investor in the country next to the oil giant Total.

Goulamaly has high expectations in the future satellite monitoring system for controlling the fishing waters in the “exclusive” French zone. He dreams of setting up a regional fishing fleet that would be to the Indian Ocean what Air Austral is to the region’s skies, and establish a French Indian Ocean University to defend francophone interests that are disappearing fast with the arrival of Chinese, Canadian and Brazilian investors.

“The president told us to ‘take our destiny back into our own hands’. That’s fine, but how can we do it with empty pockets?” complained Goulamaly, a pillar of the employers’ community and proud of Reunion’s know-how and development. “We are the best in education, health, sugar cane and renewable energy.” He was sorry all these advantages were being eroded for lack of export guarantees, such as those provided by the French government agency Coface before it was privatised in the 1990s. Those concerns were echoed during the July 2009 convention of French overseas territories and departments, and have since been laid down in a blue paper on maritime policy published by the Inter-ministerial Committee on the Sea (Cimer) on 8 December 2009 (7).

At present Reunion is suffering the fallout from the global financial crisis. In 2008-9 Reunion had its worst performance in 12 years, which has exacerbated a situation already marked by inequality and poverty. More than half the population (52%) lives on less than €817 per month (the national poverty threshold), compared with 13% in metropolitan France. Moreover 17% live on less than €473 (the regional poverty threshold), and 147,000 people receive the minimum social benefits. According to Paul Vergès (8), president of the Regional Council, that is tantamount to “social apartheid”. The unemployment rate is three times higher than in metropolitan France (24% in 2007, compared with 8% in France), especially among the under 25-year-olds who make up 49% of the unemployed. The number of people out of work rose by 24% in 2009.

More than a third of young people with two years’ higher education are in precarious employment. Illiteracy affects more than 100,000 people, and 21% of the16-25 age group have serious difficulties in writing (compared with 9% in France). During the convention of French overseas territories and departments held in Reunion from May-July 2009, one of the workshops suggested “reinforcing social cohesion” by “clearly prioritising employment for Reunionese youth” in public and private sectors, and improving the performance of the educational system by “taking into account all aspects of Reunion identity”.

Bumper to bumper

During his visit to the island, Vailland observed that the railways had transported their last passengers in December 1963. Yet today the train/car issue is hotly debated and the Reunionese are torn between nostalgia and exasperation. Do they, he asked, want collective or individual transport, public service or “freedom”? With more than 400,000 cars on the road for 817,000 inhabitants, asphyxiation and traffic jams are an issue, although that has temporarily improved in the western part of the island with the recent opening of the Route des Tamarins motorway.

According to Laurent Gautret, an expert from the Reunion Regional Energy Agency (Arer), Reunion will have an estimated one million inhabitants and 800,000 vehicles by 2025: “the equivalent of a 3,000 km bumper-to-bumper traffic jam” (9). Hence the idea of developing a public transport network across the territory with a major “tram-train” project, similar to those in Nantes, Mulhouse, Strasbourg and Lyon, but never implemented in an overseas territory. That would mark a return to trains and public service, and generate an estimated 2,000 jobs for building the railway and 300 for operating it. It would also open up new business centres in the communes served by the network and have the added benefit of reducing pollution.

The Matignon agreement, signed in January 2007 with the de Villepin government, mentioned a public-private financing partnership for the railway with help from the French government, the European Union, the Reunion Regional Council and a group of private investors. The debt would be repaid in the form of a “rent” over the period of the contract. After the 2008 financial crisis, with the impetus of the environmental forum Grenelle and the convention of French overseas departments and territories, the French government approved the financing for this flagship project in May 2009, considering it of national importance.

The project has made headway under Paul Vergès, chairman of the Reunion Communist Party (RCP), which is in the majority in the Regional Council. But the financing has run into difficulties and work has yet to begin. If his party wins the regional elections on 14 and 21 March, Vergès can hope to obtain further financial assistance. That is a new challenge as chairman of the Council, but hardly his first: his newspaper Témoignages has been demanding the return of the railways since the 1970s. The political stakes for the island are high, since development is now higher on the agenda than traditional political issues, such as status. On the right, people oppose the project, in the name of “freedom”, refusal to pay more, and an attempt to remove the enfant terrible Vergès. The left, if the last obstacles are overcome, will back a new means of transport, with extensions and branches throughout the island, secured for decades to come which will provide the island with an alternative to the current “all car” system.

But should the current majority fail to win the elections, the project will be in trouble. The right thinks the investment – €1.6bn for the first stage of the project, and a total of €5.4bn – way beyond local means, as reflected in their slogan, “Ruine pas nou!” (“don’t ruin us”); they are instead promoting an umpteenth redevelopment of the coastal zone, which is subject to the vagaries of cyclones.

Presidential blessing

Vergès seems sure of himself. The crisis has brought the social housing programme to a halt with the loss of 7,000 jobs. Vergès warns endlessly of social unrest if the grand Reunion tram-train project isn’t saved. He appears ready to stake everything on the tram-train project as “vital to economic recovery”, even if it means politicising the debate, as the right have done. “The elections have made people mad,” he said. “It was a UMP [Union pour un mouvement populaire] government that ratified the Matignon agreement in the first place, but now the local rightwing parties are challenging the tram-train project, and therefore the Matignon agreements, for the simple reason that it is a Regional Council project.”

President Sarkozy, who decided to send his new year’s greetings to all France’s overseas territories from Reunion on 19 January,
managed to avoid mentioning the flagship project, Vergès’ baby. He praised Reunion’s efforts in environmental protection as leaps ahead of those in France or other overseas departments. He vaunted the future merits of “ocean and sun”, promised “a digital opening up” to the rest of the world — as a guarantee of prosperity but also of attachment to metropolitan France — and hoped for the establishment of a medical university. We must invent a new development model, he concluded, one that is less artificially dependent on metropolitan France.

In Paris, they have learnt how to deal with Vergès, who has been president of the Regional Council for more than 10 years. Many people believe that the island’s great man is playing his last card (he is 83) or running for one election too many. The Communist leader, who advocated policies of “rallying around” in 1998 and “alliance” in 2004, has again opted for the broadest possible opening to ensure that his list is re-elected. The academic Robert Chaudenson (10) calls him a symbol, the synthesis of half a century of Reunion politics. He says he has always managed, without ever going back on anything he has said, to integrate successive changes in the Reunionese, French, European and global political landscapes, into the RCP’s policies, defending in turn political independence, then equality with the social security system in metropolitan France, integration into the EU, and now ecology, through research into energy independence and sustainable development. All this “smoothly and without misgivings”.

The ever-militant Vergès never misses an opportunity to remind his compatriots that Reunion’s status as a European region shouldn’t make people to forget their geographic roots. Vergès, who is also president of the French Observatory on the Impacts of Global Warming (Onerc), says we must draft a “new contract with the Earth”. He wants to deal with solar energy; and then, after the tram, electric cars; and then gas, sugar cane, tides, satellites. Meanwhile, the jumbo jets of “territorial continuity” continue to pollute the air; and an A380 that landed on 11 November proudly displayed the EU’s blue star-studded pennant.

(3) In 1946, the previous (leftwing) generation, had, on the contrary, claimed that assimilation would bring economic rights and social advantages. The former colony of Reunion was transformed into an overseas department, and its citizens were granted full French citizenship. But they rapidly became disillusioned in the face of the establishment’s resistance to change.

(5) The islets in the Mozambique Channel and around Madagascar, albeit tiny and uninhabited, provide France with a 640,000 km2 “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ) rich in tuna, while the French Southern and Antarctic Lands of Kerguelen, Crozet, and Amsterdam (7,500 km2) provide a further 1.4 million km2 EEZ.

(8) Paul Vergès, the current president of the Reunion Regional Council, is also the founder of the Reunion Communist Party, and was its secretary general for 30 years. He remains the president of the party but no longer holds any executive functions.